I haven’t been taken ill, or shut down by unfriendly fire from governments or lawyers.
In 2003 my life collapsed around my ears; I was hopitalised several times and I had neither time nor capacity for personal administration. Over the next couple of years I lost job, income, home and marriage. I was simply unable to face the mountain of correspondence those crises generated. Unless the address was handwritten, I didn’t open it, and sometimes not then. Being bipolar, one of my problems in depressive periods has always been a terror – and I use the word carefully – of opening mail. Then I moved into a tiny flat with nowhere anyway to file anything.
The upshot is that 90% of seven years of correspondence lay in almost thirty cardboard boxes, perhaps a third of it unopened. Much of it is indeed very unpleasant. To give just the example of life insurance policies, 27 different letters saying direct debit payments were missed, and subsequent letters detailing the cancellation of these policies. Plus matching letters from the bank detailing payments not made and fines imposed for “administration”. 17 letters from British Gas threatening disconnection, 11 from Thames Water. 54 letters from debt collection agencies threatening court action. 62 letters from the Inland Revenue, who pursue me with a zeal they never display about Lord Ashcroft or David Mills.
Then there are the 48 solicitors’ letters about the divorce, the letters from the Foreign Office about my sacking, the letters from the Treasury solicitors trying to stop publication of Murder in Samarkand…
You will have gathered that, my life being very much together again, and finally having some filing cabinets and somewhere to put them, I have spent the last week ploughing through the whole lot, sorting it and chucking or filing it as appropriate. I shut myself off from the world and got down to it. It has been tough, as of course it evokes starkly some very, very hard times and difficult emotions.
There is of course also stuff which brings a warm glow. Memories of Nadira’s support in times of despair, little bits and pieces belonging to my children. The loving emotions are the most disabling of all.
Anyway, good news is I am almost finished. It will be a huge weight off my mind.
Most cheering of all were the over 400 letters of support, mostly from complete strangers, many of whom outlined their own experience of injustice and persecution. Many real apologies to the large majority, to whom I did not reply. They have all now been read.
Back to blogging by the weekend, I hope.
If you have never done this for real, then you cannot possibly understand.
I had done this for real between 1976 and 1979.
I had also worked on the most powerful computer in the World.
When they made me redundant in 1980, I dreamed about doing this – and actually made a start.
But it wasn’t possible on a Commodore Vic, nor a Commordore 64, nor even a Commodore Amiga.
Ten years ago, and more recently Microsoft gave it a shot, and spent Millions on it…
Their efforts were actually pretty good, but they were only really tailored for Powered Options. I had tried the Powered options for real too, but found them incredibly boring. There didn’t really seem any point except for if you wanted to get from A to B quickly. Even doing it for yourself didn’t require much skill. You just point the thing in the general direction and press go. The power would pull you along even if you were pointing sideways…
Now there have been some valiant efforts, done for free, by volunteers to improve on Microsofts efforts, and they do work quite well…
But none of this comes close to what arrived today.
It is so completely Brilliant, that I am determined to get really fit again and do it for real, even though I have not flown a glider since the morning of Led Zeppelin’s last ever concert (with the original line up) in 1979
In the morning I flew from Dunstable. In the afternoon I went to Knebworth with My Girlfriend.
The Condor Gliding Simulator is Completely Fucking Amazing.
£7.17 + £1.99 shipping from Amazon.
Loads of Police about today.
Good to see them.
Tony
Tony: don’t wish to appear pedantic (well maybe I do) but Zep’s last ever concert (with the original line up) was July 7, 1980 in Berlin. I was at Knebworth too, for both shows. They were OK.
Your real friends are the people who do things for you for Free. They do not do it for any financial or other reward. They do it because they want to – for themselves – because it will make them feel good for giving something for Free.
They expect no reward whatsoever, except the smile on your face.
Tony
MJ,
I don’t claim to be a historian, but I did see Led Zeppelin at both of their concerts at Knebworth in 1979.
And in about half an hour a mate of mine is going to pick us up and take us to see a Led Zeppelin Cover Band
Some of these Young Kids do it better than the Original
Tony
“Some of these Young Kids do it better than the Original”
I know, it’s frightening really. Hope you enjoy it.
Our Friend who is picking us up in about 5 minutes in his Silver Machine is one of the most remarkable people we have ever met
He is English
He spent the first 19 years of his life as a travelling gypsie
Really traditional – horse drawn
And then unlike the usual thing, he did it the other way.
He Opted Into Society
Completely Gave Up All His Old Habits
And After a Government Training Program, Eventually Got a Job as a Trainee Computer Programmer
That was a few years ago
I reckon it worked
Tony
I thought he was here – but not yet.
Despite giving up all drugs, and he never even drinks more than one alcoholic drink a night…
Despite being completely English and having a Really Posh Refined English Accent
He Has Long Dreadlocks and a Brown Face
His Mum is Lovely, and his Sister Incredibly Beautiful
Both his Parents were born in Jamaica
Shouldn’t we Celebrate Our Commonwealth?
Tony
“In my own psychology I find that being lied to opens up first a sexual reaction (?!) which I obviously have to control, second, if I decide to believe the lies, an intense anger.”
Why would you choose to believe lies? But then anyone who’s chosen to believe the biggest lie of all, (religion), might as well continue on the same path, having already said goodbye to common sense. Pretty lies may seem preferable to plain truths if you don’t have an innate respect for truth, and religion offers certain privileges, such as exemption from logic, reason and secular law…..
I was thinking about her older sister Mutsa, she is barely 2 years old yet
And her New Born Sister Shamiso is getting all the attention
So I thought it is only fair that Mutsa Gets a Present Too
And When She Realises, and Her Baby Sister Realises
I just hope I live long enough to see these Girls Grow Up
So that I can tell them about their GrandFather
I just want to say to them that,
When I was about 10 Years Old
He Nicked my Metal Globe of The Earth
And He Did It
I Honestly Don’t Think ANYONE Had Done This Before
He Made My Metal Globe of The EARTH
Spin Completely Stabley in FREE AIR
This was before Computers
He had an electro magnet at the top and bottom and coded the stabilisation circuits with a soldering iron
Catherine’s Dad, My Older Brother Richard is The Cleverest Person I Have Ever Met In My Life
Tony
Love you to bits Tony…but>
Give us a fuckin’ break man yeah?
XX
So i said to her…
What the fuck do you mean?
I’ve been researching Space Exploration for 40 years.
And what i found was.
Nobody drank our cider.
Except for her.
And she was the most beautiful woman i’d ever met.
Apart from that guitarist last week.
Who was the best guitarist ever-and i know the difference.
I used to drink scrumpy with Peter Green.
Although my lad’s in the CIA-although we dont mention that.that’d be provocative.
So i said to him…what do you mean the wholemeal bread’s gone off?
He couldn’t answer that.
I knew
So i said to this beautiful girl i me tin Goa>
What does that mean?
And she didnt know either.
So i plugged into the FOH system and Eq’d them until they sounded like the best.
And they all came back to ours for spliff and shit.
I never knew it could be so kinda real.
Owen Lee Hugh-Mann,
I think that your interpretation of religion as ‘the biggest lie of all’ is a mistake. Dawkins goes into the human propensity towards religion in some detail in The God Delusion, interpreting it as a byproduct of human instincts towards dualism and childhood belief in the authority of elders.
Also, as most religious teachers believe what they are teaching, it is not a deliberate deception.
Your point about secular law is also dodgy. Religious adherents often submit themselves to more demanding rules than are required secularly. This sometimes brings them into conflict with secular laws, in which case many of them are prepared to suffer the consequences.
You don’t need to tell me that people like Blair make a total mockery of what I’ve just written. That’s not religion, that’s ego motivated hypocracy, and yes, there’s plenty of that about.
Look
Its Just There
We Couldn’t Give a Fuck If You are Rich or Poor
We Couldn’t Give a Fuck What Your Religion is Or the Colour Of Your Skin
We Couldn’t Give a Fuck About Your Politics or The Music You Listen To Or The Books You Read ?” Or Your Behaviour
We don’t care about the Language You Speak
If The Time Has Come
And You Have To Give Birth
We Will Welcome
Your Child Into The World
Tony
“Hmmm…” at 1:39 AM was posted by an American, IMO. They follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
Not a funny post.
“Not a funny post”
Nil nisi carborundum.
tony,
have you thought about writing several books this year?
Tony, have you been to the Bow Shock?
“Not a funny post”
Well, apart from the last two lines, I thought it was quite a good parody. If Tony isn’t offended I won’t be.
Owen Lee Human
Not being given to lying myself, I don’t have a conscious method of detecting lying in others. I don’t choose to believe lies. I choose to believe statements that appear to be credible, rather than accuse people of being dishonest.
The allergy to lying operates through my subconcious. For example you deny the existence of God. That is a blatant lie. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable at all, rather I pity you, that God gave you everything you have and you were unable to respond with anything in return. By contrast, the twisted lie that torture is acceptable for security purposes, being considered by the JCHR, makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
If you definitely knew that someone knew about a bomb, but you just wanted to make them confess it, I can see some justification for a bit of force. But if you were blindly guessing, on the premise for example that someone had attended a madrassah, there is no chance that torture will elicit anything except something to stop the pain.
As I said above, the suppliers of torture, corrupt regimes, and the end-users of torture, our government are THE SAME PEOPLE. It is not just that they are making a demand for torture, as Craig argued. I would go further and state that they make regimes that torture, supply them with the equipment for torture, because they like to threaten Muslims especially, with torture, to scare them into relinquishing their practises and beliefs.
The fact that they are, as a bonus, receiving information from torture is so that they can deceitfully claim that the torture saved lives. The purpose of torture is to scare people in the War against Islam. The powers that be use war and torture as a tool for persecuting Islam. The JCHR is a committee for obfuscating that fact, not for clarifying the morality of their policy.
4.30 PM is from me.
Owen Lee,
Carisbrooke High School 1970s ?
Anno and Owen Lee Hugh-Mann,
anger and the sexual response are quite closely related, sharing a majority of their associated physiological reactions,
http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/anger.htm
That Anno has noticed this suggests that his self observation is better than average; most people would suppress such a thought.
Anno,
Owen Lee’s denial of God would only be a lie if he believed in God, but wrote that he didn’t. Also, Owen Lee wrote nothing about God, only religion.
If Tony isn’t offended I won’t be.
Posted by: MJ
I love a bit of (highly amateur) sleuthing. I was involved in a couple of group blogs, with Australians and Americans. We had an debate about punctuation (for a “house style”) and the Aussies and I had the ‘Chicago Manual of Style’ quoted at us by the Americans. Their rules for punctuation are quite different from ours. If that parody wasn’t written by an American I’ll be surprised. Not that it matters who wrote it. It’s just me doing my Clouseau impression.
Clark
‘Owen Lee’s denial of God would only be a lie if he believed in God..’
What an exraordinary statement!
The JCHR think that putting the disgusting acts of removing people’s finger nails and tanking their lungs with water into a gentlemanly discussion in an annexe of parliament under the bongs of Big Ben obfuscates the lie that the Brittish Government subsidises, pays for, demands, expects, commissions, receives, and is grateful for torture.
The deed is a lie, because it contravenes the fundamental social law of human nature that if we cooperate together we succeed and if we discriminate and persecute we fail. So the boffins of the UK think that they and they alone have the wisdom to rule the world, and nobody else has anything to contribute to the sum total of civilisation. That UK plc is the best of all societies in the best of all possible worlds and that anybody else with a variant of their disgusting creed is a deviant and only fit for oppression and torture!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wake up and smell the coffee, Messrs UK plc. Are you going to carry on blasting your opinions onto the rest of the world, by bombs and drones and nuclear threats and prisons until the day of judgement, totally regardless of the punishment in the hereafter of such crimes? Are you going to carry on sending your devious diplomats round the world to subvert and subjugate, spy and deviate till the rest of time?
By Allah, if this is your intention I hereby now relinquish all ties and relationship with the United Kingdom.
Let my curse be added to the curses of the angels to a race that rejects the truth of ISLAM.
Anno,
good morning. I wish you well.
A problem is unlikely to be solved unless it has been properly understood. Misrepresentation of reality occurs through multiple processes, for instance:
1) Lying – where I say that which I know to be false.
2) Lack of self knowledge – where I speak from a belief without understanding my unconscious motivation.
3) Error – communication of erronious belief.
All must be countered to achieve accurate representation.
I attended Craig’s JHCR hearing. Some members seemed to be trying to minimise the government’s responsibility for torture, or maximise legal manouvering space. Another seemed to use the matter for party political advantage. I wanted to jump up and shout, but I knew I’d be escorted from the room (as one person was), so I did what I felt I could by scrutinizing the face of each speaker, hoping that they felt that scrutiny.
I doubt that I will ever share your faith. But I believe that we already share much in the domain of morals, and I’ll continue to try to influence things for the better.
Which is better? A mashuarah or Islamic consultation process with one leader who takes the opinion of all, or an inquiry where the audience is compelled to silence and the chairman steers the discussion to his own will?
The only reason that the disbelievers were left to walk upon this earth was to prove to the Muslims that the disbelievers would never cease from creating mischief without the fear of Judgement to chastise them, and to convince humanity that the punishment of hell was deserved.
Clark
Good afternoon
The most common reason for the denial of God is that people were taught false religions, i.e. we worship God THROUGH Jesus, stones, trees, saints, which contradicts the fitra or inner understanding of God’s existence on our human hard drive.
The second common reason is where guilt at having broken God’s commandments is solved by denying the existence of God and what we have been taught.
The third, and most alarming reason is now prevalent in the younger generation who have been brought up by their mothers, to deny the existence of God’s commandments and to think that religion is merely patriarchal control.
Yet other people, or their parents, saw sufferings that made them question God’s mercy. But He says in the Qur’an that by no means whatsoever did He ever do harm to His creation, except to bring them back to their inborn faith which is written on the human hard disk. ( Not His words of course. )
Not knowing the faith-deniers on this website personally, I couldn’t possibly know what drove them to disbelief. What I object to is the INSTITUTIONAL USUKIS attack on Islam, through western-armed despot dictators, through savagery conducted by mercenaries like the Jesus Army in Sudan, through overwhelming explosive force like Baghdad, by torture and the fear of torture, by withholding charity promised in good faith, like the 20 billion promised to Gaza by Gordon Brown , like the whipping up of racial hatred in the western media, and the endless, endless lying and cover-ups by the powers that be.
If anyone wants to disbelieve, that’s fine by me, but don’t let us participate even remotely in the institutional persecution of Islam by Christianity in the form of respectable committees consisting entirely of liars and obfuscaters of the truth.
Lastly, and for me most importantly, we citizens of the UK should remember that however much our leaders persecuted other peoples through the nations, they persecuted US, the citizens of the UK, FIRST. The principle of freedom of speech and freedom of belief, secured for us by force by Oliver Cromwell , the product of Civil War and Revolution by our forbears, had as much weight as the Geneva Convention. It is a freedom that is not awarded to anyone who dares to oppose the murderous activities of our leaders through the ages against the Muslims. it is a freedom that is is banned completely from the adherents of our faith.
When Craig put his freedom to the test, he found it didn’t exist, and he was in the establishment. What hope is there for the rest of us?
Sorry, for nations please read generations. Ta.
Anno,
please nuture your hope; I hope that the following mild contradictions can help you to do so.
We, including Craig, still hold freedom of belief and (slightly limited) freedom of speech. The JHCR proceedings were obviously constricted, but they were broadcast live by Internet and later on the UK Parliament channel.
Mainstream Media coverage of the issues we would like publicised is meagre, but not non-existent. Yes, it is swamped by the messages of capitalism, but a small flame is visible, and flames can sometimes spread rapidly.
Things do not always go in favour of the elite. The Internet was partly a US Military project, but now is a great vehicle of free speech, and Twitter is based on the commercial system of mobile ‘phones.
The restrictions placed upon Craig were of power and employment rather than of free speech, though I do see your point – Craig’s voice *as an ambassador* was silenced, though not his voice as a person.
More robustly, I disagree that the ‘respectable committees’ are Christian in any meaningful sense; though I can see how they could appear to be a continuation from past (false) Christian atrocities, I think they have lost any vestage of true Christianity. Likewise, I think that the power base uses fear of Islam (deriving from an outdated instinct) to further their capitalist ambitions.
Yes, morality is ‘built-in’ (I think it resides in the ‘Human BIOS’ rather than the hard disc) – science is steadily revealing this – though I would argue that there is a propensity for faith, but not for any particular faith.
Most hard drives come with the ultra capitalist Windows(r) pre-installed. I prefer to erase this, and replace it with the community generated Linux, which requires no antivirus software because it is less promiscuous by design!
Clark
It is not morality that is built-in. That is very much the product of upbringing. The required information comes from the prophets, peace be upon them all.
It is faith which is in-built, and this is proved when humans get into distress. They ask for help from God. Usually God responds to the sincerity of this prayer.
The JCHR, led by that pop-eyed terrorist and Friend of Israel, Dismore, were perfecting the art of English stiff upper lip when distressing things are being discussed.
” What I want to ask you is, you see I’m not entirely clear about… Do you think you could tell us a little more about that… ” which means: I live in a little village in the Cotswolds where these sort of things are never discussed. Is this a bit like cricket without the umpire? or is it more like rugby, just for good sport?
The disingenuousness of these dreadful people could do with a military coup or even a false bomb scare to wake them from their unbelievable aura of tediousness.
Their strategy is to delay the process of government introspection until the general election and then declare it all old news. The JCHR is an absolute, total disgrace!